J.K.Rowling – despre beneficiile esecului

Stiu ca ninge in Romania si e vreme de stat in casa, cu o cana de ceai/vin fiert in mana, asa ca va invit si pe voi sa cititi cateva dintre cuvintele adresate de J.K.Rowling absolventilor de la Harvard. Daca aveti 20 de minute la dispozitie, va recomand sa ascultati intreg discursul.

“I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged.

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.”

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters. ( Seneca )

(via Lucian)